Thursday 2 June 2011

The parts of a fern

Today I picked a fern leaf from my front yard and decided to label it and use it as a scrapbook entry. In the picture below it shows the backside of the fern where I labeled the frond, leaflet and sorus (The main visible parts). The frond is basically just the whole fern leaf and has many leaflets sprouting off of it. On each leaflet is about 40 sori that each contain sporangia which cannot be seen with the naked eye. Most of the ferns here have sori that look orange or brown but because there are over 10,500 different species of ferns, its not hard to find one that looks different like this one that has white sori. Sporangia located on the sori go through meiosis and produce spores. The sporophyte is the dominant generation - It is vascular, diploid and is the stage you see when walking in nature.

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